An airline meant for "catching smiles" . . .

This is a personal (real life)  reflection your Lady Boomer thought you might enjoy:

It was the heyday of airline employment in 1976.  Deregulation had not yet hit, the pay was great, and the travel benefits even better for this LadyBoomer who was in her 20s at the time.

Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) sported planes painted bright pink, each with a smile applied below the cockpit windows on the underbelly of the nose of the aircraft.  In these days before sexual harrassment laws, flight attendants wore matching pink mini-tunics with short-shorts (lovingly referred to as hotpants at the time) beneath them while flashing panty-hosed legs and high heels. It was the businessmen's visual delight as they flew up and down the coast while watching these ladies place luggage in overhead racks and dip like Playboy bunnies to serve drinks.

We had flights from San Francisco to Los Angeles every hour on the hour from 7 am until 10 pm, a "midnight flyer" special for $17 one way (for which you lined up, first-come-first served) and arrivals and takeoffs to other points throughout California every ten minutes or so.  There were no seat assignments -- something Southwest Airlines copied from us in later years......  In fact, except for pre-boards (elderly people or those with small children), there were no boarding priorities at all.  Just a herd of bodies to usher on and off airplanes so that we could have record-quick "turnarounds" of the aircraft.

As a PSA passenger service (ground) agent at the San Francisco airport I wore a similar outfit. Unlike the flght attendants', however, mine thankfully lacked a strategic cut-out at the cleavage portion of the tunic.  I remember throwing my trenchcoat over my miniscule outfit when taking the long walk from the ticket counter to the boarding gates just to fend off oglers along the way (those were the days..).

Airport agents either stood for long hours selling tickets and checking baggage at the terminal's lobby ticket counter or ran back and forth between departure gates to board people onto planes.  I loved making announcements and became an expert at nuancing the temperamental jetway devices up to the aircraft door, after which I would help open the hatch and greet the flight attendants, who looked as if they could use a stiff drink by that time. Bad days were when we had to handle an entire gate room full of grumpy travelers during San Francisco's frequent fog delays or become the soundingboard for complaints when our planes had mechanical problems.

Since we were the commuter airline of the west coast, we had a huge cross-section of people using our services. At first I got all flustered when checking in celebrities -- people like Patty Duke and husband John Astin, Donald Sutherland, Hank Aaron, the entire Chicago Bulls team, Leonard Nimoy, a few comedians and lots and lots of politicians.  After a while, it seemed so normal to recognize a few famous faces in the crowd that my excitement began to dwindle.  I realized a lot of people whose personas were recognizable preferred to travel in anonymity whenever possible rather than be fussed over.

One particularly busy Friday evening at PSA gate 34 (where OJ Simpson once ceremoniously jumped over gate room seats while filming a Hertz commercial) I had a line of passengers that snaked back 100-plus people long for a flight to San Diego.  Our computers were of the rudimentary Bunker-Ramo variety, with a tiny screen -- a device used primarily for stockbrokers at the time.  As passengers approached the boarding podium, we tore off the perforated tops of their ticket jackets (like the one in the photo) and called it good, while accounting for them in our tiny computer terminals.  Once we counted up our paper scraps and noted that we had not over-checked-in the aircaft, we would make our boarding announcements, lower the ropes to the jetway and let the maddening crowd jockey for seat locations.

In the habit of keeping my face buried in the Bunker-Ramo screen to count bodies, I asked, "..last name, please?"  I looked up to find a teenaged boy and a short man on the other side of my check-in podium. The little man had a wrinkled fishing hat on, his small face obscured by sunglasses.  "Hope," said the man.  Then he lowered his glasses, permitting me to see his face.  The man with the funny hat was Bing Crosby. His son, Nathaniel, was an ace junior golfer who headed down from their San Mateo area home to southern California often to play in tournaments. Bing then flashed a larcenous Burgess-Meredith-esque smile, as if to say, " -- let's just keep this between us, eh?"

And he and his son ambled down the jetway, just like the rest of the herd, onto the waiting, smiling pink plane.